A while ago I wrote about ThreadLocals and how useful and tricky they can be. In that blog post, I also wrote that it was a good practice to clean up your ThreadLocals so that, if the Thread was reused, it would not have access to the previous values. The recommended way to do this for a web application was to use a ServletFilter.

After running this setup for a while, I also have to add that you really have to know all the entry points into your application in order to achieve 100% cleanup coverage. Normally the ServletFilter is adding what is called a "Cleaner" into the ServletRequestCleanupService. That is required before you can cleanup callbacks for any of your ThreadLocals. In our log file I saw that we were not always adding a "Cleaner". This was an indication, that we were running code which had not been passed through the ServletFilter, so I reviewed our application.

It turned out that the first problem was a missing url-pattern element inside the filter-mapping block in the web.xml file. Unless you are mapping to /* make sure you are catching all the possible Url's. The good news is that since Servlet 2.5 you are allowed to have multiple url-pattern elements inside each filter-mapping element. So this was an easy fix.

Some people were writing that you could also separate multiple pattern with a comma. I haven't tried that myself.

Another problem area are application internal Thread pools. For instance do we use custom Events in the Spring framework which are passed between Spring beans. Per default this is done synchronously. You can change to asynchronous Event delivery by using a ApplicationEventMulticaster together with a proper TaskExecutor (i.e. org.springframework.scheduling.concurrent.ThreadPoolTaskExecutor instead of default org.springframework.core.task.SyncTaskExecutor). However if you do this, you are creating yourself a thread pool. Listening to and handling of the Events will be done in separate Thread and not pass through the ServletFilter. So I was looking into ways to make sure, that each Event Listener adds a "Cleaner" and executes the cleaning logic afterwards. This was a good candidate to use an Aspect.

I have used the @AspectJ syntax for this Aspect and made it a Spring bean. This means I can compile the Aspect using a regular Java compiler. Instead of using load-time or compile-time weaving, we are using the Spring proxy-based AOP approach. In the code above, I am creating 2 Pointcuts, each one mapping to one of the Listeners where we actually have to do cleanup. This is probably not very future proof. Someone else might write another event listener in the future, which does then not have a Pointcut mapped to it. On the other hand using the proxy based AOP approach is probably slower than real weaving and some of the listeners which we have (5 currently) are really receiving a lot of events. So I sacrificed a future-proof implementation for maximum performance.

The 2 Pointcuts selecting listener execution are then combined in another Pointcut, which is then finally being used to create an Around advice which has a similar cleanup logic to the ServletFilter. Splitting Pointcuts into logical units with meaningful names is also a good AOP practice which I can recommend. I also took the liberty to rename a few classes. ServletRequestCleanupService became just CleanupService and ServletRequestCleanupCallback became CleanupCallback, which was more fitting now that not everything was passing the ServletRequestCleanupFilter anymore.

Time to wrap this up. If you need to clean up ThreadLocals from your Threads, investigate carefully make sure you have covered all entry points to your application. At least at some logging so you can find "holes" easily.

In by Reikje

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Guten Tag! Do you like Scala, Java and coding as much as I do? I am a 41 yrs old Berliner, stranded in Scandinavia. I work in gaming as a Software Engineer and every day is a day solving problems and fighting DD's.